Best Movie With Real People Being Crazy: The Act Of Killing

Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

0

Shares

Director Joshua Oppenheimer sought to make a documentary about the late-1960s mass murder of an estimated 1 million suspected communists in Indonesia. Oppenheimer found that the victims’ families were too afraid to speak, partly because the executioners (read: celebrated national heroes) were still around. But those executioners are more than happy to not only gloat about their achievements, but also dramatize these murders in the form of the Hollywood genre films they admire. And so we get uncomfortably close to Anwar Congo, grandpa and war criminal. Congo explains and reenacts his methods in an unsettling, surrealist documentary, where those in power and those behind the camera dictate truth and manipulate morals.